Black Mirror Season 4: Charlie Brooker on What the Show is Trying to Do

Netflix has released a featurette for their science-fiction anthology series Black Mirror. In the video, series creator/writer Charlie Brooker explains that the idea for Black Mirror came from the lack of one-off stories being told on television. He saw the trend being for long series about troubled, but fascinating characters… which he was a fan of, but thought that there weren’t any of those one-off shows you catch late at night that left you wondering, “What the hell was that?”

The show has a sense of unease about the march of technology. The video also features producer Annabel Jones discussing the freedom the series has to do just about any type of genre they want, from a black-and-white to a space epic to an American indie film (which they do with Jodie Foster as the director). Foster talks about the short story form having a beginning, middle, and end. Brooker also acknowledges that while he’s always maintained that these episodes do not exist in a shared universe, one of the episodes does start referring to things that happened in other episodes.

For those not familiar with Black Mirror, it is a British science-fiction television anthology series created by Brooker. The show centers on the dark and potentially twisted consequences of modern society and the effects of new technologies. Its an anthology series set in either alternate presents or near futures and are self-contained episodes. The series originally debuted on the British Channel 4 back in December 2011 with a second series running in February 2013. A third series was ordered by Netflix, which aired in 2016. The fourth season was commissioned and wrapped filming in June 2017 and debuted in late December.

Has quietly been working at Bleeding Cool for over three years. He has written comics for Image, Top Cow, Shadowline, Avatar, IDW, Dynamite, Moonstone, Humanoids and Zenescope. He is the author of the Lucius Fogg series of novels and a published photographer.